Spaces in the Cedar Brooke Idea Home by Weaver Barns are handcrafted within an perfect Amish-style cabin in the woods using the finest materials on the market today, according to press materials for the 2019 Great Big Home + Garden Show.

Stefanie Paganini will be among professional chefs from the Chester Township-based International Culinary Arts & Sciences Institute to give cooking classes on the Loretta Paganini School of Cooking stage at the 2019 Great Big Home + Garden Show Feb. 1 through 10.

Upcoming Great Big Home + Garden Show will, for 10th year, tantalize you with what could be

This treehouse in the Backyard Living Showcase by PROPS Consulting gives visitors to the 2019 Great Big Home + Garden Show new ways to think about a mother-in-law suite or guest room.

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The music theme for the 2018 show inspired the Auburn Career Center landscape and construction students to create a French Quarter Courtyard in keeping with a jazz theme.

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Spaces in the Cedar Brooke Idea Home by Weaver Barns are handcrafted within an perfect Amish-style cabin in the woods using the finest materials on the market today, according to press materials for the 2019 Great Big Home + Garden Show.

Fantasy will reign a few weeks from now at the Great Big Home + Garden Show, which celebrates a decade of shows at the I-X Center Feb. 1 through 10.

Setting the tone for a year in which winter seemed as if it would never arrive will be the showcase gardens, each based on a fairytale with a storyline drawn in flowers and plants forced into bloom months earlier than they will be in real-life Northeast Ohio.

Auburn Career Center juniors and seniors in the Concord Township-based vocational school’s landscape and construction programs will present a natural interpretation of Little Red Riding Hood’s journey through the woods to Grandmother’s cottage. As visitors are drawn deeper into that fated woodland, they’ll see for themselves the pleasures and dangers that lie ahead. Instructor Dave Richards has 24 juniors and seniors in his landscape program working with 20 juniors in the school’s construction program to create the fantasy of the familiar fairytale.

The Auburn group, which has built a garden for this annual show and its predecessor for more than a dozen years, not only has the space at the show’s entry to the gardens, it has the largest space in which to work.

“But creating the illusion of a scary path into the forest still isn’t easy in a 40-by-45-foot space,” he said.

To do that, the students are using large tree trunks and overhead branches along the walk from the village to Grandmother’s cottage, he said.

“Also new for us this year is a natural stone water feature and a bluestone patio at the cottage,” he said. “We’re also embedding gravel in concrete as one of the ways to stretch our minds and skills.”

Classes learn new techniques in creating the garden for each show, he said. “I learn new things every year, too,” he said.

He’s thankful that the weather this year has been typically milder as show time approaches because it makes the daily 45-mile drive from Concord Township to the I-X Center much quicker and less hazardous. Because Richards lives in Ashtabula County, his daily commute in late January and early February totals 180 miles a day.

Warm-and-sunny days make it less likely that the school district will call a “snow day” during the nine days gardens must be built inside the sprawling I-X Center, near Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. On official snow days, students are not permitted to work on the garden, he explained. But the show must go on.

“We try to plan to do our garden in seven days, just in case,” he said. “One year we had horrible weather, with four snow days called during our nine-day build time,” he said. “We recruited staff, alumni and many others to work on the garden when students were home.”

Career center students typically spend a half day at Auburn and the other half day at their home schools for other academic work. During preparation for the Great Big Home + Garden Show, his classes are divided in half so each group can spend four 8 a.m.-to-5 p.m. days preparing the class garden. Local school districts sending students to Auburn Career Center are Riverside, Painesville, Fairport, Madison, Perry, Kenston, West Geauga, Kirtland, Berkshire, Cardinal, Chardon and Newbury.

“They are very long work days for high school students,” he said. “But they’re learning real time lessons and working with deadlines. For many of them, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

Auburn Career Center and Oberlin-based Lorain County Joint Vocational School are the only high school programs to build one of the 11 showcase gardens this year. The Lorain school’s masonry program will portray Humpty Dumpty in its garden.

Other show highlights include the 1,881-square-foot Modernized Millennial Idea Home, a four-bedroom energy-efficient colonial with energy panel structures for enhanced efficiency; and the Backyard Living Showcase, with its Treehouse, Outside Think Tanks, She Shed, Kids Bunkhouse, Hunting Hut and Fitness Hut. Home improvement celebrities such as those seen on HGTV will share their passions with audiences several times each day, and experts on the Petitti Gardening Stage will give daily seminar. Kids can take home an orange apron and learn how to use a hammer while constructing a small project of their own during the Home Depot Kids’ Workshops.

Stefanie Paganini will be among professional chefs from the Chester Township-based International Culinary Arts & Sciences Institute to give cooking classes on the Loretta Paganini School of Cooking stage at the 2019 Great Big Home + Garden Show Feb. 1 through 10.